IMMEDIATELY available: Some 1,900 job vacancies in the public healthcare sector.

As of last month, these were the number of positions waiting to be filled, spread across the roles of nurses, doctors, allied health professionals, administrative and support staff.

Even as the labour market overall shed nearly 19,000 jobs in the first six months of the year, 4,500 people were recruited by hospitals here – leading to a net headcount increase of 2,700 in the public healthcare sector.

Two in three of these jobs were filled by Singaporeans, and of these, nearly one in five were above 40 years of age.

This was according to latest data from the Ministry of Health, which last year had embarked on a plan to recruit 7,700 more healthcare professionals over five years at a cost of $1.47 billion.

At his recent National Day Rally, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had spoken of the need to prepare Singapore’s healthcare system for the implications of an ageing population.

Among those recruited in the push to build up the healthcare workforce, were mid-career professionals such as from the banking and sales sectors – even retrenched semiconductor workers.

Mr Toh Koon Peng was a printing technician who had been in the industry for 25 years before he was retrenched last December.

His efforts to find a new job were in vain. Then in May, he learnt from a friend of an opening for a technical assistant at Tan Tock Seng Hospital.

His willingness to learn won over the interviewers. But it wasn’t easy getting used to the laboratory environment.

“I took about a month to adapt and forced myself to learn as fast and as much as possible,” he said.

Ms Jocelyn Yip, 35, who had worked in the textile, construction and semiconductor industries before joining Alexandra Hospital this month as a secretary, said: “The company objectives in these industries were mainly to achieve better production rate and profits.

“Joining the healthcare industry has widened my horizons, especially in the way it deals with issues of humanity.”